Testing Your Survey

One of the most important stages of survey building is the testing stage. Time spent testing your survey and reviewing test data in reports and exports prior to sharing your survey is always time well spent. Testing will improve your respondents' experience and ensure that the data you get will be in a format that is useful to you.

Our testing suite has all the tools to help you with the process. Once you've built your survey questions and styled your survey to achieve the look and feel you desire, head over the Test tab of your survey.

Note: If you manually close your survey, test links will continue to be accessible.

Recommended Steps for Testing Your Survey

Below we will cover the steps we recommend taking before launching your survey.

Step 1: Take the Survey Yourself

Start by taking the survey as if you were the respondent. The easiest way to do so is to go to the Share tab and to click the View button (located to the right of the Primary Share Link) to open the survey in a new tab.

If you have access to the Test tab, click New Test Response.

The survey will load in a new window and you can use the available settings at the top of the page to customize your testing experience.

Click Preview Settings to indicate which page you would like to start testing. When selecting later pages in your survey please be aware of any logic you have set up. Questions that are shown based on previous values will not display if the question was not answered.

You will also have the option to select survey Language if you have multiple language versions available.

If you have created multiple survey themes (based on survey link), you can choose a theme for your test here.

Finally, if you are using URL Variables for logic within your survey you can test this functionality by entering the URL Variables here.

Use the Fire Actions toggle at the top of the page to indicate whether you would like to trigger actions during your test. For example, if you have a Send Email Action in your survey selecting this option will send the email when that page is reached. URL Redirect Actions will not fire in Preview/Test Mode.

Indicate whether you would like to Record this response. If you choose this option, the response will show on your Responses tab with a Test flag and will be available in reports and exports. We recommend recording a few responses so that you can check out how your data looks in reports and exports.

Indicate whether you want to View Comments that may have been left by previous testers. Learn about this feature here.

Last, choose a mode of display from the available options of Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile.

Once you have selected your testing options, record at least one complete response to check for any snags caused by validation or required questions and get a general feel for the potential of survey fatigue.

Step 2: Generate Test Responses

Now that you've experienced the survey you might choose to Generate Test Responses. This will run our test response generator and provide you with additional responses so that you can better examine your data in reports and exports.

Click the button to Generate Test Responses.

Indicate the number of test responses that you would like to generate.

If you'd like to generate random open text values leave this option toggled.

Step 3: Invite Others to Test

Once you've recorded a test response on your own, you can also share the survey with others by clicking the button to Invite Others to Test. You can send an email to invite your survey testers or you can get a Test link to share on your own.

Invite by Email

Enter the email addresses for the stakeholders you would like to have test your survey. Customize your subject line and the message content. We recommend indicating that this is a test and requesting feedback on the survey. You can also enable comments from the testers and email notifications when those comments are left.

Invite by Other System

You can also access a Test link to the survey that you can distribute as needed by clicking the Invite by Other System tab. Copy and paste the link provided as needed and allow for comments from test respondents and email notifications of those comments.

Step 4: Review Test Responses

Now that you have some test responses recorded, you can explore your data. Start by viewing your individual responses under Results > Individual Responses. Click into your test responses and verify the data that has been recorded.

Step 5: Run Reports and Exports

You should now have sufficient data to examine your reports and exports. Head over to the Results tab of your survey.

Under Results > Reports we recommend taking a look at the Standard Report that is there waiting for you. A Standard Report will allow you to view your data in a summary or aggregate format. This is one of the most critical steps for testing. The way the data for each question reports depends on the question type you are using. This gives you the opportunity to change how you are asking the question if you require different data than what you are getting in the Standard Report. Phew, crisis averted!

Under Results > Exports the CSV/Excel Export will open a spreadsheet in Excel. If you are planning on doing any analysis outside of SurveyGizmo, you will definitely want to verify that your raw data looks as it should.

Next Steps

If you haven't already done so, check out the look and feel of your survey on the Style tab. The are many options for customizing the look and feel. Check out the Style Your Survey Tutorial to learn more!

Yes, the 'Generate Test Responses" features support the Percent Branch action.

There are a couple of options for testing your percent branch:

Option one is to use the 'generate test data' feature to generate a handful of responses. You can then review these responses under Results > Individual Responses to make sure that they are accurately following the branching that you have set up.

The second option is to do some manual testing - submitting several responses to make sure that the branches are accurately displaying the items contained within that branch.

I hope this helps clarify!

Best regards,

David
Documentation Specialist
SurveyGizmo Customer Experience

— Ezequiel on 03/13/2018

"Generate Test Responses" supports percent branch? How Can I test surveys with percent branch to be sure is working properly?

Admin

— Bri Hillmer on 02/07/2018

@Berenice: We do not currently have the ability to include collaboration in the Word download. I think this is a great idea however and will make note of it for discussion with our development team as a possible future improvement!

Can I download a word document with the survey questions and the testers comments? When I go to the export survey to word tool, I can check to show things like logic and validation but not question comments. Is there a way to do it?

Admin

— Dave Domagalski on 01/29/2018

@Berenice: Thank you for your question!

It sounds like you are referring to 'Comment Mode'. If that is the case, this article should be a good reference for leaving/viewing comments:

https://help.surveygizmo.com/help/comment-mode

I hope this helps clarify!

David
Documentation Specialist
SurveyGizmo Customer Experience

— Berenice on 01/26/2018

How can I check the comments that my testers left?

Admin

— Dave Domagalski on 11/30/2017

@DataArts: Thank you for your question!

I'm afraid that the 'Generate Test Responses' feature does not currently support generating/passing in URL variables.

Hello Bri, question for you. Are we able to use populate URL Variables while using your ` Generate Test Responses` feature?

Admin

— Bri Hillmer on 02/17/2017

@Nikki: This is a bug that our development team is working on. Should be fixed up soon!

Bri
Documentation Coordinator
SurveyGizmo Customer Experience Team

— Nikki on 02/16/2017

Hey there!

In the new testing/preview mode, we have the option on the top left to "go back to test" . Seems that if you hit submit at the end of testing however the test screen is blank and the"go back to test" option does not take you anywhere and you cannot move from the screen. Currently we are having to shut the window and reopen/log in to SG to get back to the survey.

Is this happening for others?

Cheers :)

Admin

— Dave Domagalski on 12/05/2016

@Mike: Thank you for exploring our documentation content!

I'm sorry for the trouble!

With regard to generating test responses, there have been limitations with regard to logic for quite some time, I'm afraid. But perhaps you are referring to manually testing logic (via the Preview page, for example?).

Selenium was previously used by some of our developers for automation testing within our application, though I'm afraid it was not used specifically to test logic. Depending on the complexity of the logic that you are wanting to test, it may very well be a good solution.

With regard to the "Generate random open text values" setting, when disabled this would result in no test data being generated for open text question - it sounds like you are seeing different behavior? If so, this is certainly something we can look into in your specific survey.

Comment and questions. 1. Logic testing used to work better than it does now - IIRC. 2. Do the developers (or any customers) use Selenium or anything similar? I have only just found it, haven't tried it yet, and as the documentation states, sometimes automated testing is not appropriate. 3). I will ask this elsewhere too. It does not seem possible to turn off Generate random open text values, regardless of the state of the checkbox. This is causing problems for me.
Mike

Admin

— Bri Hillmer on 09/21/2016

@Jsimoulin: Testing logic using the test data generator is not something that we have slated for development in the future I am sorry to say. Long term I would love to see us build a simulator that helps those with a lot of complex logic be sure that it is working as it should. I'll be sure to pass along your feedback to our development team but I cannot promise this will be addressed anytime soon.

How do I delete the automatically generated responses and comments from my survey report?

Admin

— Bri Hillmer on 08/17/2016

@Guest: What you describe is typically the the result of a blank translation of your survey. I can also happen if you changed the default language at your overall account after creating the survey itself. If you continue to have trouble please do reach out to our support team; they should be able to sort it out!